In restaurants and food service establishments there is a need to maintain cooked food at temperatures where the quality of the food will not degrade over time and which allows the food to be quickly served. This is especially true in so-called "fast food" restaurants where a relatively large volume of different food products must be maintained in a sellable state allowing quick delivery to the customer. If the food is not cooked until the customer orders, the service will be too slow to satisfy the average customer. If the food is precooked and then refrigerated, the heating time required subsequent to the customer's order is reduced, however, the taste, consistency, and appearance of the food may be detrimentally altered during reheating. It has been found that for a balance of fast service along with the acceptable taste, consistency, and appearance required by fast food restaurants, the food should be cooked and then stored at a temperature which is high enough to allow the precooked food to be served upon ordering.
Previous food warming units known in the art have had problems keeping food at the appropriate temperature. This was especially true when the food warming cabinet was required to maintain more than one type of food or food product category at a single time. Different types of food or categories of food products need to be maintained at different temperatures in order to maximize the amount of time they can be stored between cooking and being served.
In addition, each category of food products stored in a warming cabinet has a set holding life before it must be immediately served or otherwise destroyed. Previous food warming units use countdown timers mounted in the comer of the cabinet. When an food product is placed in the cabinet, the operator sets a countdown timer. Problems develop when multiple items of the same food product category are placed in the warming cabinet at different times. Previous food warming units known in the art do not adequately inform the operator which item has the least amount of holding time remaining before destruction is necessary. The timer provides no correlation between the time remaining and the individual food items. This problem compounds when several operators place and remove food items from the same cabinet. Because the timer provides no information identifying the time each food item has been in the cabinet, the operators must rely on their memory or communications between themselves. The operators often forget which food item has been in the cabinet the longest and overlook the food items that must be used first resulting in spoiled or poor quality food.
Further, in food holding cabinets known in the art that have electronic control systems, the electronic circuitry associated with the controller has been necessarily located proximate to the heat source in the food warmer. Because the electronics are constantly exposed to heat, the control circuitry has a shortened useful life span. This results in unnecessary failures of the holding cabinet controls and greater food spoilage.
Thus, a need has arisen for a new holding cabinet and a control system which will maintain multiple categories of food products at different temperatures and for different time periods, will provide a user friendly method of selecting the appropriate maximum holding time and temperature for a given category of food product, will communicate to the operator which food item from each category of food product in the cabinet must be served first, will communicate to the operator for each food item the holding time remaining before that food item must be served or destroyed, will notify the operator when the temperature in the cabinet falls below a holding set point, and will provide a distributed control system to locate the majority of the control circuitry in the cooler portions of the holding cabinet.